Post-modernism laid the groundwork for an ‘I have my facts and you have yours’ culture.

I feel like this is a common regressive take. The Right/anti intellectualist movement understood postmodernism as giving them the right to claim that facts don’t matter.

Post modernism itself is a way of interrogating frameworks we take for granted. It’s not saying “facts don’t matter,” it’s saying “how do we know those are facts”? There are valid questions to ask about science as a way of knowing - which epistemological frameworks we take at face value, and if we really can. Lolita is a postmodernist work, because it’s asking you to interrogate what a novel means (in the context of an unreliable narrator - HH is lying to you, but he isn’t real. what does that mean about what is being described in a novel? Is a novel a window into a different universe which has a reality to be described?)

The Right’s unreality is more of a Romantic one - none of those fuckers are reading Derrida or Deleuze. It’s more reality to sexual insecurities and the death drive. I’m not a Freudian but I look at anti intellectuals and see deep sexual confusion and fear. If “male” and “female” are permeable categories, how does someone who defines their existence solely by their white masculinity going to police the boundaries of their own identity?